Shakespeare's Women & Claire Bloom (1999 TV Movie) User Reviews

too short, too short, too short!!!

[hurwicz · 10/10 · 7 July 2002]

too short, too short, too short!!! As expected, this short documentary contains interviews and clips from other materials. The jewel is in the excerpts from her one-woman recital (especially done for this film??).

A wonderful lesson

[Adrian_Paul_Botta · 10/10 · 7 July 2016]

Indeed it is too short. Once I've started watching, it ended in a blink of an eye. I was numb in my chair at the end, trying to wake up again in the real world. It was a lesson, for me, an uneducated savage who knows almost nothing about the theater. I am very subjective too, because I was hoping to see a movie or documentary where Claire Bloom is 99.99% there on the screen. It's a ten out of ten for me. Six means popcorn, eight it was interesting and ten - I can watch it again and again, and every time I will find something new. At the end I felt like someone who just learned to read and is holding in his hands his first love letter. I think anyone can and will love theater after watching this documentary.

A most excellent presentation by Claire Bloom.

[Bernie4444 · 10/10 · 25 January 2024]

For people not familiar with Shakespeare or just have a cursory knowledge of Shakespeare, this is a perfect introductory to most of the plays. For those people who know most of the major Shakespeare plays. This is a perfect introduction to some of the less well-known Shakespeare plays.

The focus of this presentation as you can see from the title "Shakespeare's Women" focuses mostly on the women's roles, many of which were played by Claire Bloom herself. We are lucky to have Claire Bloom as the narrator and introducer as who else would know better about the evolution of Shakespeare plays than Claire Bloom?

Another great advantage of this presentation is just having Claire Bloom as the single narrator instead of a whole bunch of sound bites where we bounce off of one so-called expert to the next so-called expert and back again and back again.

Many of the film clips are from movies and recorded plays that I have seen but there are quite a few were new to me, and I am not sure where I can get them. This alone is worth purchasing this documentary.